And what did we learn?
One of the most interesting encounters I have with people is when they figure out that I was the front line of business plan defense at Union Square Ventures in 2005-06--roughly the time period they submitted their business plan. "Ah...I know your name....You turned my business plan down."
:)
What's a guy to say there, "Um...yeah...sorry."
Once in a while, you get someone who bashes all VCs...at least all the ones who turned them down. My favorite thing is to ask them what they learned about their interactions with VCs, like this exchange I had the other night.
"So what did you learn?"
"I learned that VCs only like to invest when all the risk is off the table."
"Ok, and what did you learn about your idea?"
"I learned that we're going to be bigger than Facebook and we don't need those guys to be successful."
Ummm...ok. Not exactly the learning experience I was hoping for.
I've said this before but if you can't take anything away from a conversation with someone who turns you down...no lessons learned, you're not backable. Period. Its fine if you believe strongly in your idea, but you have to respect the fact that the guy on the other side of the table is no slouch either, and has seen way more startup ideas than just yours. So, perhaps that person is terribly wrong about your business, but even then, it points to an issue in your presentation. How could you have made a more convincing argument?
Try and take something more away from every "no" than just frustration and spite.
links for 2007-10-21
-
Craplets indeed.
-
Following up on the advertising toolbox, you also need to let the media (oh if only there was a site ...
Flock: Not sucking. Pretty sah-weet, actually.
I saw Fred's post on Flock so I decided to try it out again.
It's actually very cool...
First off, I've got all my various friend feeds automatically updating along the sidebar.
Twitter? Check.
Facebook? Check.
Flickr? Check.
Then, I've finally got a web plugin for blogging that works, because Sribefire/Performancing never would for me.
I can automatically upload pictures to Flickr, from the web for from anywhere on my computer.
There's a favorites button that can be configured to post to del.icio.us.
Even a feed reader, but I don't use that because I need Newsgator to sync to my phone... otherwise I would.
Best part about it is most of the Firefox plugins work with it, like my Forecastfox.
I think I'm a convert... this is a very cool browsing experience and it combines a lot of things I needed to use separate sites and clients to do.
Go get the 1.0 beta and check it out.
Blogged with Flock
Gmail issues with Windows Mobile 6 - Argh!
Here's something from the "This should just friggin' work" file.
I've been using Gmail on WM6 Outlook through its POP3 connection and it barely works. Downloading mail usually works, but sending is terrible. On Friday, I accidentally left someone hanging at lunch because he never got the e-mail I sent from my phone.
So, instead, I tried downloading the Gmail Java client. It downloads fine, but when I try to run it, it says I have the wrong certificate. After some Google searches, I thought I found the right one straight from Verisign, installed it, but I still get the same message. Ridiculous! The client downloads but it just won't connect with the server.
I've looked at a few mobile web apps for e-mail, like OneMail, but I feel pretty stupid shelling out $30 for a mail client when the one I have should already just work!
Blogged with Flock
Two Perspectives on the NYC Digital Community
Seth Goldstein told CNN/Money that he, ""figured out a way to get companies started in New York." It was never easy, though. "People there are always dragging you down," he says. "They don't want to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.""
He added, "Because New York is so mercenary, I always overindexed toward the missionary," he explains. "Out here, I'm way more comfortable being mercenary. Hyperbole and philosophy don't go very far in the Valley."
Meanwhile, Steph, a graphic designer muses about the difference on her blog:
Going from coast to coast made me realize all the PRETEND culture here in Silicon Valley. We obsess over technology news. We build online profiles so we can network. We try to "manage" our RSS feeds so we can try to be on top of trends. Alas lets admit that this isn't actually culture, these are all solitary activities which don't require interacting directly with other human beings.
So I have to ask myself, is Silicon Valley the right place to practice user experience design? Shouldn't designers, move around and interact with real people to find out what real people need or want? How effective can enclaves of software developers actually be if everybody within the enclave can only focus on their (introverted) community, and not the long tail of the worlds cultural riches? "
Blogged with Flock
Free Business Plan: Give a desk, Take a Desk (or How to get space for startups in New York City)
Ever since we wound up at Return Path, I've been thinking a lot about the model of an incubator. We heard at the recent city council hearing that incubators were tough to keep up from an economic perspective and required all sorts of subsidies, either from government or academic institution.
But my situation isn't like that. Does having us use two empty desk cost Return Path real money? Sure... but how much? We use normal bandwidth for our regular office activities and hardly ever use the phone. We borrow a conference room about twice a week and we probably take two sodas/juices a day each from the free machine. I'd be surprised if our actual incremental cash cost was $150 a month. That's because there's already an existing, revenue generating organization in place there. When you try and create an incubator from scratch in an incubator-only space, you couldn't possibly get anywhere near that.
Think about the conference rooms alone. We would have never rented a place on our own with conference rooms, because we'd never use them enough. However, a mid-size company probably only use their own conference rooms, at most, half the time.
That's not to mention that RP could potentially get from us. We do like to think of ourselves as two cutting edge startup guys that are "in the know" about things like social media, data (Alex's specialty), etc., and we're pretty well connected into the community of entrepreneurs. I've already spoken some people here about doing some knowledge sharing sessions and we're happy to pitch in with some feedback where we can, because we're grateful for the space.
If we were social media consultants, what would that have cost the company? Certainly a lot more than the desks did. Seems to me that it could very well balance out if the exchange was a couple of desks for 5-10 hours of mindshare a month. Now, Return Path may not need that from us, because they're pretty savvy themselves, but what about a big print media company looking to expand their web presence? I'm sure Jeff Jarvis would agree that rather than move forward in an echo chamber, a media company like that might benefit from having a few startup folks around the office to help them out. Perhaps they could be instilled as VPs of Common Web Sense.
So here's the deal I propose that companies with 50 or more people think about:
Give:
- 1-3 desks per seed stage startup
- Internet connection for normal office usage
- Reasonable access to unused conference rooms (prob not more than 5-7 hours/wk, but could be more if they're usually pretty empty)
- Building security passes
Get:
- Goodwill in the startup community
- 5-10 hours of mindshare from people who are thinking out of the box (which is why it makes sense to find startups in your vertical, too)
Similar models have worked in the art world, where artists occupy unused commercial real estate spaces as studios and galleries.
It's also a very green model, too, if you think about it. It's about efficient use of existing space.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Diggs? Tags? Any companies want to sign up?
Takin' Care of the Business of Me
This week, I instituted a little more structure in my life to make sure all the odds and ends of my life are taken care if. A lot of times, administrative work for your own behalf takes a back seat to all the things you need to do for your startup, for school, for others. Making time becomes an exercise in fixing the squeaky wheel... the unpaid bill, the pile of mail on your table, the friend who complains they never see you.
So yesterday, I drew myself a chart for the week. On the list, I put Gym, Read, Fix, Clean, Build, Friend. Gym is what I want to do during my workout. Read is to manage between the book I'm reading for pleasure and various career related books I'm reading for Path 101. Fix is because things generally seem to need a lot of fixing in my life, from my bike to my bedroom door which has never had a handle on it, to the keyboard on my home computer which just crapped out yesterday. Clean is about clutter. It usually means clearing old mail from my living room table or putting away clean clothes. Build most often means food, actually...like making lunch to save money or just because I like to cook. Friend means catching up with a friend either by IM or email (and maybe the phone, but unlikely because I hate the phone) and really being somewhat purposeful and focused on it, vs just casually paying continuous partial attention to someone.
I wrote down targets for each of these things and hope to get one of each category accomplished each day.
With the decline of the dollar, should we just be adopting Acebucks?
I don't like to be negative about other people's startups, but when I told Howard that I didn't get Acebucks, the company that he, Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus and James Altucher funded, he wrote back...
"You hate it? I like haters"
I don't *totally* hate it, but I do think a conversation about it would be interesting, because it touches upon a lot of interesting topics, like virtual economies, the Facebook platform, platforms in general, etc.... plus, I'm not sure I see the promise of this. I say that given that smart people have already invested in it, so who cares what I think, right?
When I first heard about Acebucks, one of my first thoughts was "Why isn't Facebook doing this?" It seems natural that a place that supports gifting and various forms of profile bling would want to make micropayments go as smoothly as possible. Letting someone else handle that would be like the government privatizing the Treasury and the US Mint. It's almost ludicris IF the governing body sees currency as a major cog in the engine of their society. Certainly Linden Labs sees it as integral to their economy and strategic to their business to run the currency, as does Habbo and Cyworld. Why not Facebook?
Here are a few possible explanations of why Facebook might not do this itself:
1) Facebook sees itself as a network of webpages, not an immersive virtual world. Note the comparisons I made where currencies are big businesses for social spaces. Those spaces are a lot more like our typical definition of virtual worlds thanFacebook is. They are places to play, to build, to be someone else. Facebook is where I connect as the real me to real other people that I actually know. There's not a lot of "virtual" in that definition, and what that means is that you lack the organic elements that create value in the first place. The concept of land ownership and the ability to build things in Second Life are the elements native to the system. Because these take scarce resources, you create the concept of value and the need for currency.
Acebooks has the unenviable task of needing to do the job of going out and encouraging the development of scarcity, like multilevel games and virtual items to create the need for currency in the first place. When step one of your business plan is create the need for yourself, that's not going to be easy. Not only that, one thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand about virtual currencies is that they only make sense when everyone else is just as immersed in the system as you are. If you buy a sword that cuts through anything in Warcraft, everyone you encounter can see and respect the value of that. If you buy a picture of a sword in Facebook, people see a picture of a sword which might be cool, but they don't know you spent 1000 Acebucks on it, nor they they really care, because they're not into the games needed to be played to win Acebucks.
Taking what works in Warcraft, Second Life, and Habbo to Facebook doesn't necessarily guarantee success. These are all unique communities with their own norms.
2) Facebook doesn't want to be Microsoft and just eat the successful people who build on its platform. In the 90's, if you made Windows software, there was always the fear that Microsoft would ride up from beneath you in the stack and swallow you whole. This made for a very uneasy relationship. Perhaps Facebook is just trying to be as developer friendly as possible, and even when people build applications that should absolutely be a critical piece of their business, they're just going to let it fly, and not make a big stink over their success. That would certainly make it a more attractive place to develop.
3) Maybe Acebucks is just built to flip and Facebook is just waiting to see if it gets any market adoption before it trades some hyperhyped Facebook stock and a little cash for it. Facebook has more than enough things to worry about without going off into some kind of currency experiment before it will spend any mental resources and management bandwidth on this. They could just let the Acebook folks test the currency idea to see if it will fly, sort of like outsourced R&D. This would be pretty smart on their part and pretty smart on the part of Acebucks so long as their financing was done at a valuation conducive to the flip.
Either way, I'm just uncomfortable with the idea of a startup built on a platform that could just shut it off or compete against it. You could say that about any app, but few other apps are on missions so critical to revenue generation like micropayments. I doubt Facebook would want to build its own version of Zombies, but a virtual currency might hit too close to home. I suppose with Facebook investor Thiel on board, they'd know a little something about what Facebook's strategy is here. His presence makes this seem a lot more like outsourced R&D on Facebook's part and, in my mind, supports the built to flip possibility.
links for 2007-10-13
-
How are we going to get all that great "people like you did x" career data? :)
Starbucks to have free wifi?
I was just telling someone yesterday that there's no way this deal currently makes much money for them. More and more people bring their own access or just go without. They're better off making it free (or ad supported... click through two video ads to login or something) and getting more fannies in the seats. Now, every Starbucks can be an incubator. :)
My Testimony to the City Council hearing on Promoting the Technology Sector in NYC
I have been asked to deliver testimony to the City Council today on promoting the local tech sector, particularly within reference to ITAC's recent report.
Here's what I've written up:
My name is Charlie O'Donnell and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Path 101--a New York City startup focused on career discovery and development. I am also the Founder of nextNY, a grassroots, participant driven organization of over 1,000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals right here in the city. nextNY is made up of entrepreneurs, designers, developers, investors, marketers, and media professionals--all integral parts of the local digital community. Before founding my company, I worked for Union Square Ventures, a NYC based early stage venture capital fund and then for Oddcast, a local interactive advertising company, as a product manager.
In all of these various roles, I've had a unique opportunity to see the recent growth of the NYC technology community from both the startup and investment perspective--as well as from the perspectives of all of the ambitious people I've met through nextNY.
New York is truly coming into it's own as a hub of innovation and technology over the past couple of years, but I say that knowing full well that innovation has been part of NYC for quite a long time, even long before the Late 90's tech boom. What's happening now plays uniquely into NYC's hand. The technologies that once represented a strategic advantage for Silicon Valley and Boston are being commoditized and it is becoming more and more important to be close to your client and user community than to develop your technology in a particular city. In today's climate, a startup in the video space can and will be just as well served by rooting here in the New York media technology community as it would anywhere else.
Still, given the sheer volume of talent and resources available in the city, we have not reached our full innovative potential. There are several points of friction that hinder the emergence of NYC as a paradise of business creation and cutting edge digital contribution.
First, much of our technological workforce has largely been trained to work for big companies. Their jobs are often about maintenance, efficiency, and satisfying business objectives than they are about pushing the envelope, creativity, and true innovation. They are compensated with lucrative cash compensation, as opposed to the upside that the equity ownership that incentivizes startups. This creates an environment where joining a startup not only represents financial hurdles, but cultural ones as well. It’s hard to tell your NYC friends that you’re tossing aside your job in the Goldman Sachs IT department for a startup company—people just don’t accept that as a legitimate job route compared to that being the norm in the Valley.
One of our best strategic advantages, creativity, driven by the city's arts, multiculturalism, globalism, and critical mass of other creative industries, needs to be fostered and guided into these innovative technology fields earlier. It starts with our education system, and we need to be telling students and showing them how to be the leaders and influential members of the digital community. I grew up in Brooklyn, went to high school in Manhattan, and college in the Bronx--largely through the late 90's tech boom and I had very little knowledge of the innovation and development going on right here in NYC at the time. All I saw were bankers and lawyers. The idea of putting my passions behind creating a company were as foreign as you could get. There needs to be a significant amount of education around the extraordinary opportunity that NYC brings with it. Students should be emerging from school with real ideas and real passions, not just jobs they found at the top of a help wanted list. They need to have the skills necessary to see there ideas through. We face a serious shortage of engineers, developers, and designers, and even fewer of what we have are proficient in the most cutting edge languages and technologies. The ITAC report outlines new initiatives in Workforce Development and Education that would go a long way towards addressing those issues.
Information is also critical. Groups like nextNY serve as a knowledge resource, but even our 1,000+ member collective knowledge is unfamiliar with all of the various grants, city services, and innovation friendly services the city and various independent organizations have to offer. For example, when I worked at Union Square Ventures, I was constantly discovering new incubators at local universities--places I didn't even know had entrepreneurship programs.
When cities want to encourage tourism, they often spend resources on creating a map, a booklet, and a website--all as exhaustive as possible in trying to advertise all of the possible tourist destinations anyone might want to see. What NYC needs is a similar information dissemination program as detailed in the ITAC report. Most importantly, it needs to be a living, breathing, open resource built on some kind of wiki-like platform where the members of the technology community can be just as responsible for its upkeep as various city services can be.
My final bit of support for what ITAC has recommended has to do with real physical infrastructure. Over the years, those involved in technology innovation in small companies and startups have always made due with whatever physical places we could find to conduct our business. We shared insider information about where wifi could be borrowed and where businesses wouldn't mind if you worked at a table for a whole morning and just ordered a cup of coffee or two. This has been highly inefficient. While there are businesses like Sunshine Suites that have sprung up to service part of the need for startup companies to maintain a home, there exists a severe lack of community space--places where creative minds can collaborate freely and connect to each other. A good place to start would be to incentivize as many cafes and similar gathering places to provide internet access free of charge. Municipal wifi may be too difficult to implement, but a very workable, and less expensive substitute would be to make sure that every conceivable place where you would want to set up shop or meet with others, would provide wifi. In the same vein, there should be incentives for other types of innovation support. For example, my startup, Path 101, is currently living in two empty desks provided by another larger technology company called Return Path. It was a favor done for me by the CEO, Matt Blumberg, who knew we were looking for space, but in all fairness, Return Path should probably receive some kind of tax credit for doing its part to support the local innovation community.
If there was one thing I would want to leave off with for all of those who are interested in supporting the technology community in New York City, I'll tell you simply to join it. Instead of asking us to come here and testify, which is great, don't get me wrong, it shows your interest, show up at our community events. Come to the a nextNY gathering, join our listserv, or a New York Tech Meetup. Start reading the blogs of local entrepreneurs and blogging yourselves. Get off the email newsletters and get on RSS feeds. Join LinkedIn. If you don't use the same tools as the technology community and show up to our events (instead of just inviting us to yours), you are never going to be looked upon as a source of active support and your programs will fail to get traction. Supporting a community is just as much a social undertaking as it is a management or financial one.